About the age of 14-15 (as I have told in Life Rarely Tells [1958] )
I began to be interested in poetry and in Greek mythology. Keats, in his poems
and letters, affected me strongly with the idea of Beauty as a form of Truth,
Truth as a form of Beauty. That is, the idea that the formative forces at work
in human beings sought to bring about new balances or structures which had found
in Beauty their highest point of integration, and that Truth was not a mere
correctness of factual statement but the moment of grasping how those forces
thus worked. I would not then have phrased my intuitive responses in those terms,
but it was along such lines of thinking that I was moved to a passionate conviction
of the dynamic and creative nature of Keatsian Truth-Beauty. I was seeking to
grasp the nature of development and was reacting against mechanistic interpretations
of life. There were idealistic elements in my formulations, but I was also rejecting
idealism and saw in the term God only an evasion of the issues. I felt in poetry
and art a force that broke through accepted levels or structures of thought,
and that held the vital clue to new and more integrated forms of life. Keats
said that, in listening to an unseen singer with a lovely voice, one imagined
the beautiful face. ‘That face you will see.’ Thus from the outset I felt in
poetry the clue to the forward-movement of life, the forces that would somehow
beget new qualitative levels, forms, modes of spirit and body (matter), new
unities. From Shelley I gained a feeling of elemental energies ceaselessly reasserting
themselves in nature and in humanity, akin at all levels, though the levels
were not identical.

How the links between artform and life operated I had no idea,
beyond a desperate feeling that I must give a total obedience to what I

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felt the creative element in poetry and art, which was somehow connected with
the impulse to find unions outside oneself, especially in love, in sexual experiences.
Somehow the criterion of Truth-Beauty distinguished what was valuable in tbe
releases of that impulse, in the union it brought about. There was a growing
feeling that society as I knew it was organised on lines hostile to the release
of the creative impulse, though how or why I had little idea. For a while I
had something of a personal cult of St Francis of Assisi, which omitted the
religious terms and was concerned only with the rejection of everything that
did not simply and directly help towards love, union, the acceptance of the
sanctity of all living.

By the age of 17-18 I had come on Plato and Blake, each of
whom from different angles strengthened the convictions started off by Keats.
Plato gave time the idea of a triadic movement of thought on to new levels,
new centres of knowledge and self-expression. The reactionary forces in society
held back this movement, but again I had little idea of how and why. The doctrine
of supernal Forms that ultimately determined the breakthrough on to new levels
of comprehension, I neither rejected nor accepted in any definite way. I saw
such Forms rather in a Keatsian sense as the directive core in the moment of
creative achievement, without asking how they got there. (I struggled to grasp
the dialectics of Herakleitos, which I found stimulating and baffling.)

From Blake I gained clearly the concept of contraries or opposites
continually emerging to bring about new unities, the forward movement of life,
and I saw in his Prophetic Books the dramatisation of the struggle. Here I felt
was the working-out of the Keatsian system, a poetic definition which brought
powerfully out into the open the entangled and submerged tumult of my deepest
emotions and aspirations. (For the next 60 or so years I was indeed to return
every now and then to Blake to test out what I had learned and to reformulate
the ideas which I felt seething in his work.)

By the age of 19, making use of the library at the Queensland
University. I had read and pondered Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria
and several works by Bergson, Croce, Gentile, Alexander, as well as parts of
Hegel and Goethe. My concept of dialectics was enlarged, even if there was much
in the work of these thinkers that confused or eluded me. (I was studying also
the poetry of Donne and the so-called Metaphysical Poets. I was strongly affected
by Bergson's Time and Free Will, and henceforth the question of Time
haunted me: Time as the repetitive and mechanistic system of the clock, which
I recognised as lying at the heart of all the science with which I was acquainted
 though I kept on trying to understand Einstein in the hope that he

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had broken through the systems based on abstract Time; and Time as the concrete
moment of experience, which involved the dialectical leap into new unities,
new qualities, new vital relationships.

One way or another this problem of Time has remained with me: abstract and
concrete time. Here I felt lay the core of the struggle between life and death,
between a forward movement on to new levels and a ceaseless inhibitory repetition
of unchanging systems. I was unaware at the time how Bergson had affected so
many writers, from Proust to Joyce; in any event my response had an element
which I think was not present in the others. The concrete moment was for me
creative in the Keatsian sense, revolutionary in the Blakean sense.

I had also read Freud, interpreting his terms and symbols rather in terms of
a Blakean universe. The struggle, as I saw it, was to transform the unconscious,
the whole mass of sensuous and emotional reactions heaped up from the moment
of birth, into the creative image of art, which put order into the inner universe
of conflicting urges, and gave life a valid meaning and direction, even though
the next moment the achieved structure and balances were threatened and had
to be realised afresh on a new level, in a new situation. Those who failed to
resolve the conflict were torn by divided impulses or stupefied into an inert
acceptance of the existing world with all its unbalances, injustices, falsifications.

My ideas were given a yet further field in which to operate when I read Jane
Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual, then her Themis and Prolegomena.
Greek mythology, in which I had been so interested from the angle of its poetic
presentations, its symbolic redefinitions, came fully alive, linked with the
rituals through which the peoples of tribal societies in various stages of development
had striven to understand and control their lives, in both the individual and
the social aspects. Here was expressed their dynamic relation to nature as well
as the living structure of the group’s experience, the transformative unions
and conflicts. The concept of art and its functions was richly extended. Above
all I was affected by Gilbert Murray’s excursus on Tragedy in Themis, in
which the basis of Greek drama in initiation ritual and its structure, its imagery
of death and rebirth (the passage of one level of life or experience to another),
was brought out. The dialectic of change and development was given a crucially
important new field, which was seen to have deeply affected the interpretations
of both history and individual growth. I returned to the books of Spencer and
Gillen on Australian aborigines which my mother had and on which I had browsed
in early years.

Now in 1919-20 came the reunion with my father, Norman. I became the disciple
of the positions he had set out in Creative Effort.

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This meant for a decade the sharp limitation of the ideas I
had been struggling to grasp and develop. Those ideas were cut down to a Blakean
scheme of Los the artist, aided by his emanation Enitharmon (with whom he came
also in conflict), as the sole constructive force in a universe falling into
darkness, contracting to dead mechanisms, to the limit of opacity, Satan. Los
by his imagery, his rhythmic formations, resisted the fall and set into action
the contrary movement of integration and joyous self-realisation. With these
positions there came an end to the efforts I had been making to relate art positively
to social process. The mass of mankind were seen as inert, unresponsive to dynamic
Form, and therefore always liable to surrender to the evil pressures of disintegration
and repression, with money and things as their sole aim, their spiritual reflection.

The one important new element was the thought of Nietzsche.
Here the Hegelian dialectic was narrowed down to an existentialist ethic of
the Free Spirit (whom we identified with the Artist) opposed to the servile
masses. Nietzsche thus strongly reinforced the very worst aspects of the N.L.
aesthetic, its elitist and racialist components. But there were elements which
I could validly link with elements of my previous thinking: the concept of the
Beyond-Man. The Ubermensch was the moment, the leap into an intensified
freedom, human fullness, significant activity; he represented the dialectical
movement beyond a given state or level, which was necessary if that state or
level was not to stagnate and degenerate. (To see him as a Superman was to vulgarise
the concept hopelessly, though he did also represent an ideal of transformative
living.) Life was seen as a ceaseless struggle to transcend the limitations
of the existing stage of things with a fuller and more unified consciousness,
which at once pervaded all spheres of life and action.

Man is a rope stretched between beast and Ubermensch, a rope over an abyss.
Perilous is the crossing, perilous the way, perilous the backward look, perilous
all trembling and halting by the way. Man is great in that he is a bridge
and not a goal: man can be loved in that he is a transition and a perishing
. . . I love them which greatly scorn because they also greatly adore; they
are arrows of longing for the further shore.

The concept of the Ubermensch thus merged with that
of concrete Time which I had built up out of Bergson. Life was seen as forever
breaking through any formulation that could be made of it. Every image, definition,
expression, however powerful and effective in its resolution of the opposites
or contradictions with which it grappled, could never encompass perfectly the
situation it tackled. Life in its endless potentialities, conflicts, harmonies,
burst through every

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definition or organisation made out of it. The very success of any such definition
or organisation deepened the emerging problems, the contradictory complexities
of the issues to be grasped and expressed, so that it started off the whole
struggle on a new and more demanding level. (I opened my Dionysus (1928)
with the aphorism that it was the function of thought, not to solve the riddle
of the universe, but to create it.)

The years 1921-25 saw the first working-out of this phase, with the periodical
Vision. Then came the movement to London through the Fanfrolico Press.
Though I held generally to the N.L. positions till 1930-31, new stresses and
strains kept appearing as I sought to grapple with the modernist world and its
expressions more directly and fully. I set out my own version of the N.L. universe
in Dionysus and William Blake (1927), while in the essays written
for The London Aphrodite the attempt to deal with contemporary culture
showed the first stages of a movement to a new synthesis.

During these years I sought to write poems which defined a moment of pure sensuous
enjoyment, and verse-plays which used a fusion of Elizabethan, romantic (Keats
to Beddoes) and contemporary idioms and rhythms to express, first the liberated
image, then the inner conflicts of love that broke down the aspirations of a
life lived-out in pure sensuous enjoyment. (Also in Marino Faliero (1927)
I tried to deal with the revolutionary political impulse which I had now put
behind me, using the N.L. line of Justice as a social concept impossible of
actualisation on earth.) In my poem on Beethoven’s C sharp minor quartette I
attempted a lyrically philosophic statement of our beliefs. I had moved to the
position that the only kind of imagery capable of grappling with the modern
situation was that which moved beyond the romantic synthesis to that of symbolism.
I called this style the Colour Image and saw Wagner as the supreme creator of
such imagery in terms of both lyrical immediacy and dramatic conflict.

The writers who from my later teens had most strongly affected me as having
most deeply and comprehensively defined the structure of experience in its full
social context were Scott, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare in verse  though
I also read and reread with much sympathy many other Elizabethans, Marlowe,
Webster, Chapman, Jonson, Donne.

Finally the unresolved conflicts came to a head in 1930-31, as told in Fanfrolico
and After (1962), to bring about a total revolt from the N.L. positions.
For some years of extreme poverty I struggled to rebuild a world view on the
ruins: not in an abstract philosophic way, but as an integral part of the effort
to find a basis in work. A basis that

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would enable me to carry on living and at the same time continue to express
the Keatsian concept of Truth-Beauty in terms of the experiences of the previous
twenty years. At all costs I had to find a new system or structure, aesthetic,
moral, philosophic, for my writing, which would pass all the tests I had developed.
One which carried on what I still felt as valid in my previous stages but got
rid of the confusions and falsities, the limitations, that had led to the crisis
of 1930-31.

I turned to prose, to the novel, feeling that there was the
best medium through which to build up the more objective world view for which
I was struggling. I wrote a novel with a contemporary theme, Flat Dwellers,
in which the main character was a young girl who after various sexual experiences
decides, though she has had a child, to reject all half-measures and rely on
herself alone. And a fantasy about an Earth of Satyrs and Centaurs, which is
destroyed through war and an explosion brought about by mad scientists. (It
thus prophesied the way in which the science of our divided world was moving
towards nuclear fission.) The few publishers I approached were not interested.
Then I at last came through by turning to the historical novel and starting
a trilogy set in the period of the Caesarian revolution.

I can best explain how I arrived at the new basis by turning
to the poems of Catullus, which I had translated with a long exegesis for the
Fanfrolico Press. I had seen in him the existential individual vividly depicted
in his poetry. Now I sought to grasp and unfold the world implicated there,
the social totality refracted in the individual experience. To reverse the process
that had created the poems, to expand them back into the society that had made
Catullus possible, with his intense reaction to immediate events.I saw
the individual caught up in a complex pattern of social, economic, political
mediations. (I did not yet use the term of Lukacs, but it best explains what
I was working to.) The mediations somehow came together in a dynamic moving
unity. The pattern was refracted variously in the individuals making up the
society, so that some dominant aspects of the totality were vitally at work
in each one, but never with exactly the same mixture in any two persons  though
there was an ultimate connection in the dynamic whole. Never in quite the same
way even in the same person at different moments, though there was an
ultimate unity of the self. At moments the compacting or unifying element predominated,
at other moments the contradictory or unbalancing elements asserted themselves
and there was profound and lasting conflict, which carried on till a new balance
emerged.

I was still vague or confused as to the key-forces creating balance or unbalance
(in individual or society), but I struggled to grasp the way

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in which they concretely operated at the given moment of history: that of the
Caesarian revolution. I began with Catilina and his revolt, analysing and interlinking
all the ancient or modern accounts I could get; and tried, by going as deep
as I could into the human situation to disentangle the main historical patterns,
social and political. I then went on to the crisis after the murder of Caesar;
and after that to the conflict between Augustus and Antony, the battle of Actium,
when a new balance was at last achieved.

I cannot here go further into my work as a novelist, which continued for more
than thirty years. Already in 1937, in End of Cornwall I tried to extend
the method to the contemporary scene, though it was not till the postwar series,
The British Way, that I fully grappled with that scene. From the outset
I may claim that my method was simultaneously existential and historical,
seeking to see the individual in all the immediacies of his reaction to the
moment, while setting that moment in a definite historical situation  so that
in the last resort the personal situation was dialectically linked with the
social or historical. Two more writers who affected me in the l930s must be
mentioned, Proust and Tolstoy. Proust strengthened the sense of the existentialist
moment, though he abstracted that moment from the structures of development;
Tolstoy helped me to strengthen in every way the positions at which I had arrived,
making me realise ever more acutely the problem of the living relationship of
the individual and the moving whole. Near the end of the 30s I read Lukács
on Scott, and felt that his analysis clarified further what I was seeking to
do.

While at work on my Roman trilogy, I rented by chance a cottage in which
the previous tenant had left a large collection of anthropological works. I
was thus able to read the theorisers and synthesisers Morgan, Frazer, Cook,
Rendel Harris, Hartland, Crawley (The Mystic Rose) and many others as
well as Malinowsky and various field-workers in Africa and Polynesia. I also
studied afresh ancient religion and the origins and developments of Christianity.
Such studies in time led to the two versions of the Short History of Culture (1939, 1962) as well as books like The Clashing Rocks (1965) and
Helen of Troy (1974). But they also permeated my whole approach to the
questions of culture, my sense of history and of the relations of the individual
and the social whole.

By 1935 I realised, as I turned more and more to look at the actual political
scene in Europe, that it was time I read Marx. I started on Capital and
other writings of his, as well on works by Lenin. At once I felt that here was
the clue to bringing together my ideas in something like a fully coherent whole.
I may claim that I had worked out in my

[p. 370: photo of Lindsay in Paris for the Peace Congress, 1949]

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own way both a dialectical method and a theory of historical materialism, but
I had not produced a stable structure. I read Marx with a sense of immense illumination,
and felt that at last my converging systems of thought had found the full basis
of dialectical interrelationship which I had been seeking. Then the Spanish
Civil War broke out and I felt myself drawn passionately into the political
struggle, with the idea of human unitygiven flesh and blood. I now took
as my theme in historical novels the moments of decisive change and great popular
forward-movement in England.

In many ways the most important element for me in Marx’s thinking was his concept
of alienation and commodity-fetishism. This enabled me, I felt, to make secure
sense of the work I had been doing in anthropology and to realise the continuity
between the first forms of spiritual-social division among human beings from
the days when the separation out from nature was reflected in ideas of the churinga,
soul-object or external soul, and related rituals. There seemed to me a clear
chain of spiritual and social states of being that led from the churinga through
a vast number of forms of the soul-object into money and into religion proper,
with its division of body and soul. Marx showed how the final stage of this
development came with the bourgeois reduction of people to things. (His careful
use of the term fetichism, it seemed to me, proved that he would have
welcomed the full anthropological analysis, not yet possible in his day, of
the way in which inner and outer division, dialectically linked, had led finally
to bourgeois commodity-production. The free human being was not only one who
had been liberated from all forms of exploitation; he was also one liberated
from commodity-production. I have however found all Marxists, orthodox or not,
to be hostile to such an approach. I once sent a considered essay on the subject
to New Left Review, and had it returned without comment within a few
days.)

I attempted to apply my concept of dialectics in a large and diverse number
of fields, which I cannot analyse here. But I wish to make the point that ‘application’
was never a matter of using a rigidly given set of ideas and forcing the material
into their pattern. The concept must spring from the inner life and movement
of the material, and only then be generalised. (For this reason the structural
system evolving was never stressed, and so did not seem to exist to readers
who could only recognise it if it were abstracted and set over against the material.)
From the start I felt that the extension of dialectics into new fields was also
a clarification and development of the methods used. If what one found was merely
a system already formulated in abstract terms, then there was something wrong
with the exploration and with the terms. I was helped in this position by the
one element in Nietz-

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sche which I felt to be valid and which remained with me (as
discussed above), and by my study of Giordano Bruno, his struggle to transform
philosophy and to grasp reality as a single dynamic process in which form and
matter are inseparably united and in whichopposites are dialectically
fused. ‘It is profound magic to know how to draw out the contrary after having
found the point of union.’ The devoted life of Bruno stirred medeeply.
I wrote a novel on him, Adam of a New World(1936), and later translated
his Cause, Principle, and Unity (1962), with critical apparatus.

I thus came early (1944) into conflict with the orthodox defenders
of Marxism in a thesis in which I set out the idea of culture (art, poetry,
science and so on) as a form of production without which here could be no human
existence, no movement forward . Culture was thus dialectically linked with
economic activity, but not in any mechanistic way derived from it. My ideas
were totally rejected. I was further attacked as wholly on the wrong track when
I published Marxism and Contemporary Science (1949). One of my points
was that conflict or contradiction could only be dialectically grasped as occurring
inside a unity; and I went on to analyse the positions in various scientific
fields to bring out what elements there were dialectically based or capable
of dialectical development. I had been much affected by meeting L. L. Whyte
and discussing these problems with him. He set out the ideas soon after published
in The Unitary Principle in Physics and Biology. His analyses were much
concerned with the part played by symmetry and asymmetry in the structure and
development of matter. Starting with Curie’s aphorism that the asymmetry created
the phenomenon, he went on to show subtly how development occurred through the
reassertion of symmetry in an asymmetrical situation. I felt strongly that such
ideas enabled one to produce a fully critical focus on post-Galilean science
with its basis in stable states, in symmetry. With Einstein, Planck, nuclear
or particle physics, the possibility, the necessity, of a new science, dialectically
based, was present. Nuclear fission, I came to realise, was the final disastrous
working-out of bourgeois science with its mechanistic basis. These positions
underlay my books on ancient science, coming to a head with Blastpower and
Ballistics (1974).

Only in Poland was there any serious evaluation of my book,
in a long critical but sympathetic essay.

While continuing to attempt to ‘apply’ my Marxism in novels,
poetry, historical or anthropological works, in biographies of writers or artists,
and so on, I did my best to recast my direct formulations more effectively.
In the 1960s I wrote two works on Alienation, Bureaucracy in Socialism,
and allied topics, but could not get them

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published. Finally I put my ideas together in a book, The
Crisis in Marxism (1981), that attempted to analyse the main expressions
of Marxist thought after 1917  in Stalin, Lukács, Bloch, the Frankfurt
School,* Althusser, Della Volpe, Colletti  and to present my version of an
open Marxism, diametrically opposed to all closed systems: to the dogma of ‘the
complete, harmonious, consistent system of all the views and teachings of Marx’
(Lenin), and to the various confused or one sided attempts to break through
the dogmatic positions. In such a version the contradiction between a dialectical
system expounding human history and a mechanistic system ruling in science is
at last broken down. That at least is how I see it.

Despite all the changes, the many confusions as well as steady
efforts to integrate afresh my ideas in order to tackle ever larger issues,
I feel a deep and living continuity between my positions as set out in 1981
and those with which I was struggling over sixty years ago in my responses to
Keats, Plato, Blake.

________________
* In Adorno the element in Nietzsche, which Ihave praised as a
defence against dogmatisms, is carried to its extreme. The result is a demoralising
parody in which nothing whatever can be said of life which is not at once falsified.
But to reach this position it was necessary also for Adorno, like the others
of his School, to consider the working-class hopelessly integrated into capitalism,
so that no class or alliance could ever break through the impasse of alienation
and resolve the bourgeois contradictions.